A flyer for one of the Skank Engine shows

Finally, the tour has kicked off (as our last show was on Saturday night)! Our second and third shows of our “More Waves Than You Know What To Do With” Tour were acoustic shows, meaning we had to switch our sound up a bit. I rocked out on some djembe with Brian on his strange irish drum. Guitar became acoustic, and the bass and the horns pretty much stayed the way they are, except Tom sang and played bass as Blake played violin. Overall it was a very interesting switch, but i’m glad I can start rocking out on a drumset for our next two shows. My hands are starting to feel the wrath of my djembe playing.

In between Saturday’s show in Bloomsburg and Tuesday, I went home and visited the family. I also took Kerns home and back to campus on Monday. We stayed there for a night before finally meeting up with the rest of the band again. They were getting lonely without their percussionists. Crazy parties did ensue.

Excited for a show in Philadelphia tomorrow. If anyone is in the area and wants to check us out, see this Facebook event for more details: Philly Show

As the week goes on I’ll continue to update my blog and hopefully I will have  a few pictures up. Peace, love, and unity!

It’s a MiTiDo release. It’s not anything like my last MiTiDo release, however. Instead of focusing on the Kaossilator, I actually went the squarepushing method this time, and these are all precise, programmed songs I was working on this semester. As there are only 5 songs, I figured it made a nice EP. Each song has a bit of character and isn’t really anything like the song before it. If you get a chance, check it out!

For more of my releases, see the “Music” page, by clicking the tab closer to the top of the page.

This post stems from my disgust after seeing a Radioshack commercial which looks like it was put together by a 16 year old high school drop out.

Also, has anyone seen the Nova Song Records page I put up? It’s a good way to follow all my releases, because I don’t always release under my name, and I like to organize things. That page is the best way to keep up to date with the material I may have created but never released. Can you say “rarities”?

Why this is a cool idea: I get exposure. People get free music. BitTorrent can be used as a legal means to distribute my music, as it seems to get a lot of wrap as a piracy-only tool. Also, I used my “record label” (Nova Song) in the release, starting up a small catalogue list inside the torrent. I basically just listed all albums released under Nova Song in order of release and gave locations for their purchase/download. So if I do manage to get a fan out of any of the leechers, they can follow up my works with similar things I’ve worked on.

I’m excited, and its good to see that in the first 30 minutes of putting up my torrent, 11 or 12 people downloaded it. I guess people just like their free music.

It was nice to finally get into Michigan (Detroit Int.), even if it was at like 11PM. Went to Cedar Point the next morning with a bunch of Liz’s friends, it was a nice 2 hour drive with some total strangers. Had a good time there, even if I wussed-out of a lot of the roller coasters. The next day was filled with packing mostly all day, with a going-away dinner for my sister that night. The next day was pack, pack, pack some more, now with a truck we had to load. It was a long, long two days, and the next day wasn’t anything to scoff at either. Close to 12 hours on the highway (a 10 hour drive + 2 hours simply because the truck maxed out around 65MPH and like 55 up hills). I drove most of that, too, I’d say about 9 of those hours were mine.

Anyway, it’s nice to be home now, my sister has been doing job interviews in New Jersey, and I’ve been toying around with electronics, because I got a whole crapload of parts in the mail while I was 500 miles away. tk47srebgd

My first circuit with the Arduino

So I just got mine in the mail yesterday and already I’ve fallen in love with it. So much so that I’ve been scrounging around the house for more electronics parts. I opened up an old junk remote and scrapped an LED and a capacitor… an old motherboard gave me a 3.3 miliFarad capacitor (that’s just the start, too). I ordered some more components, such as resistors, an LCD screen, a speaker, more wires, LEDs, etc. from AllElectronics (I used to order 1/4″ -> 1/8″ adaptors from them). The thing is, they probably won’t arrive until Friday when my brother and I will be on a flight to Philadelphia. I won’t even be able to play around much with it until August rolls around.

To the right is a picture of a push button circuit I made with the Arduino (alas, only following an example). Push the button and a light goes on. Look out technology, here I come.

First of all, I’d like to note that this is far from perfect, but for a (relatively) low budget approach this is awesome, at least in my opinion. My set sounds good and its pretty simple to set up.

For Overhead miking I use two large diaphragm  Studio Projects B1 mics. I position them on either end of the drumset, using the “recorderman” drum miking method. Basically, just take your two drumsticks, place them standing up, end to end, in the middle of your snare drum. That is the height of the overheads. Then use one of the sticks to postition the left mic one stick-length away to the left, and repeat for the right.

For Snare Drum I use a classic SM57 (Shure). Really nothing special here, I mic the top of the snare, and I point the mic down at the head about 3/4 of the way in from the center.

For Bass Drum I have two mics I switch off using. I never really invested in a bass-drum-only mic, so I started experimenting with my other large diaphragm mics: Audio Technica AT2020 and an MXL 990. I had the 990 mounted in front of the bass drum when I used it, and I think it was a bit boomy; when I tried it with the AT2020 I put a towel in my drum and put the AT2020 right inside, and I like the results much better, and I’ve been using that more recently.

I have those 4 mics running into my FireStudio, running into my Macbook, which has Logic Studio 8 running on it. If there is one thing I could change about my recording setup now its the room. I’m getting a lot of reverb I don’t want (its a little too much coming through the overheads), but I think I can alleviate that if I change the positions of my drums.

Of course, everything in this post (mics, positioning, recording software) is subject to change with your own setup, but it can’t hurt to put my setup out there, as it’s been working pretty well for me. Good luck.

So besides working on this site migration I’m fairly the same. In about 3 weeks time, my brother and I will be in Michigan with our sister, for a week. Musically things have been a little dry, but that happens. Looking forward to some new prospects though, we’ll see how they all pan out (this entire sentence feels inspired by a gold rush).